| From: "Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> | I did know about (the liklihood of things like) FreeDOS. | | What I didn't know is that it seems that bios firmware patches must come | in some kind of community-standard representation that frees motherboard | users from being stuck with using the mb-maker's fw update tool. When the PC clones first appeared, the universal OS was DOS. That's what they used as a platform for firmware updates. Only later did Windows come along and eventually motherboard manufacturers had to run the update tools under Windows. Many support both but some require Windows. Many document this poorly. There is some effort to support firmware update under Linux. I'm not likely to try it because I judge the ratio of risk to reward to be unfavourable. (The first time I bought a motherboard that came with a Windows firmware update, I tried it and it bricked the board. The manufacturer said it was my fault. Luckily I had captured a screen shot of their web page where they had briefly admitted culpability, so they did end up covering it under warranty.)